Praise, celebrate and recognize their attempts to make car, animal, and all environmental sounds. Reward your child’s attempts of saying any and all sounds.When you read be silly, exaggerate the sounds, vary your pitch and volume to grab the child’s attention and make them feel more comfortable in attempting to imitate you. Read books that have sounds in them that the child can imitate.Or visit the construction site to hear the loud trucks and diggers, or take a walk outside and listen to the birds. When a child can visit the cow on the farm or the lion at the zoo it allows them to make the connection between sound and animal more real and the boost in their receptive language results in more verbal expression. Expose your child to a new experience related to environmental sounds.These gestures associated with sounds will bring about the verbal production sooner! For example, if your child doesn’t imiate the “yuck” sound, stick out your tongue while you say it and they may stick their tongue out too. Your child may not be quite ready for verbal imitation so work on imitating gestures instead.

Because production of environmental sounds typically precludes word production I make the following suggestions to the family to encourage development of this skill:

Sometimes I work with kids who make no or very few environmental sounds. Environmental sounds can also be learned and practiced through books. Environmental sounds can be learned and practiced through PLAY you model the sound for the child and they imitate it. “Moo moo”, “neigh neigh”, “baa baa” are all single syllable, repetitive sounds. Also, environmental sounds are repetitive which make them easier for little ones to say. Environmental sounds (animal sounds, car noises, crashing noises, etc.) are also how little ones let us know early on that they understand associations between objects/animals and the sounds they make. They are easier to say and offer children the opportunity for practice in producing sounds and combining them into syllables. They are the first sounds that most children produce, long before true words. After all, our goal is real words here, so what purpose does moo or baa (or la la la) have to do with his ability to talk?Įnvironmental sounds, as they are called in the child development world, matter. The parent who most likely doesn’t have a background in speech and language development and might wonder why on earth it matters if Johnny can say “moo” or “vroom”. I commonly ask the following question when I enter a home for a new evaluation: “What animal sounds does Johnny make?” Or I might ask, “Does he make any car noises or crashing sounds?” Although I know why I ask those types of questions I recently put myself in the parents’ shoes.

Moo baa fa la la la la